Tomcat 7 or later (but we strongly recommend 8, we have at least one open bug indicating there may be problems using 7)

Jetty 8 or later

Only Tomcat 8+ and Jetty 9.2+ are officially supported by the project at this time. While older versions of Tomcat and Jetty are nominally suitable (see above), neither has been tested and have been obsoleted in any case.

We also do not officially support any "packaged" containers provided by OS vendors. We do not test on these containers so we cannot assess what changes may have been made by the packaging process.

The recommended container implementation is Jetty and all development and most testing time by the core project team is confined to the Jetty platform. At present, Jetty 9.2 is recommended for Java 7 use and Jetty 9.3 is recommended for Java 8. It's likely that only very new versions would work on Java 11, if at all.

There are no specific requirements regarding Operating Systems, but Linux, OS X and Windows are recommended.

OpenJDK

We have historically recommended the use of Oracle's "standard" JVM on all platforms. The older OpenJDK implementations that ship with many Linux distributions is used by many deployers, but the community has off and on reported various problems that have frequently been traced to the use of OpenJDK, including memory leaks.

We test extensively on the "standard" OpenJDK build provided by Oracle, and with Oracle Java 11 now officially no longer a free product, we expect to move towards a more explicit recommendation regarding OpenJDK and the "supported" options for using it. We do not expect that this will include OS-specific versions provided by Red Hat or similar vendors due to their propensity for breaking things in the past, but that's an ongoing discussion.

Unusable Platforms and Versions

The following common configurations, and versions often in use with prior IdP versions, are specifically NOT usable with V3:

Tomcat 6 or earlier. Note that RHEL 5's system-supplied Tomcat is Tomcat 5 and RHEL 6's system-supplied Tomcat is Tomcat 6. Deploying IdP V3 on these systems therefore requires the installation of an alternative application container or the use of RHEL 7, which supplies Tomcat 7 (but note the recommendation at the top to stick with Tomcat 8).

Jetty 7 or earlier.

User Agent Assumptions

There are no specific requirements regarding Browsers, but we test on only relatively recent, mainstream software, and certain features like HTML Local Storage assume standards-compliant software.

The HTML-based user interfaces make relatively minimal use of Javascript with the exception of the Duo and logout features, which include a dependency on JQuery (a version of which is included with the software).

The IdP requires the use of first-party cookies and is not designed to function without them.

The IdP does not require third-party cookies to be enabled and does not support the embedding of the supported user interfaces in frames hosted by a third party. While this may work, it is not guaranteed to work, and V3.4 and above ship with a configuration that explicitly blocks the use of frames via response headers. The blocking behavior is configurable and can be disabled, though this is not recommended for newer deployments.

Alternative JAXP Implementations

While we support only the Oracle and OpenJDK Java implementations and the JAXP XML Parser implementation included with them, it is possible in principle to use alternatives. They will not in general be likely to work out of the box (or at least not safely) because our default configuration includes settings to secure the XML parser that are built into the Java reference implementation. We strongly recommend against use of an alternative parser, but there are hooks built into the software to allow for it.

V3.4 and Above

An alternative XML parser configuration can be established by defining a custom bean of type ParserPool, and providing its name via the idp.xml.parserPool property. This is typically done through reuse of the BasicParserPool class by copying the system-provided bean in system/conf/global-system.xml into a new bean in conf/global.xml and adjusting the default attributes and features to match the JAXP implementation in use. Any appropriate security measures and protections required are the deployer's responsibility, and there is no guarantee of interoperability.

V3.3 and Earlier

At minimum, you will need to change or remove the "SecurityManager" implementation specified in system/conf/global-system.xml and you will be forced to take responsibility for the result of that change, which could introduce vulnerabilities (typically denial of service vectors) into the software.

An alternative custom SecurityManager class, if one exists, can be established via the idp.xml.securityManager property.